Actually, this Real ID thing isn't all bad.

I've been following the discussion about Real ID for a few weeks now and mostly found myself agreeing with the skeptics whenever the subject came up, whether it was because of the occasional urge to play on your own or due to serious privacy concerns. (I was going to link to a post on the subject at Murloc Parliament here, but the site seems to be down for the time being. Oh well.)

Now the patch finally reached Europe and I have to admit... when I logged on and found a guildie whom I know and trust online, I immediately whispered her asking whether she wanted to be my Real ID friend. She was happy to oblige and we then played a bit of "now you see me, now you... still do" with me hopping back and forth between various alts. There still seem to be some bugs though, as the realm and zone fields were always blank, so you couldn't actually tell when you were talking to a character on a different realm. My customised (with the default interface) chat windows also got messed up so badly by the chat change that I had to reset them completely, but it didn't take long to get things back to the way I wanted them to look.

A bit later I asked another friend whom I've known for years to exchange Real IDs as well, but she declined saying that she was using a super secret e-mail adress for her WoW account that she didn't want anyone else to know. I didn't take offense. The old, "normal" friends list for WoW only still works fine so it's not as if I'm losing anything by someone not accepting my Real ID request.

Don't get me wrong, I still agree that the Real ID privacy options are very poor (though you can't actually see the online status of friends of friends as I had feared) and could do with some more choices. But if everyone involved is aware of how much information they are giving out and fine with it, it's a fantastic way of staying in contact with people who have a lot of alts, especially if you have a lot of alts too. (If you don't have some sort of shared friends list addon, remembering to add all your friends' alts to your friends list on all of your alts is quite a hassle, not to mention that it can eat up a lot of your limited friend slots.) I've only just started cleaning up my friends lists (removing all the individual alts of people who I now have as Real ID friends anyway), and it's rather liberating.

I can't guarantee that I won't have regrets later on if I ever feel like "hiding" on a new alt and find myself unable to, but then again, I'm only adding people whom I trust a lot anyway; what's the worst that could happen?

Friend: Oh hey, is that a new alt?
Me: Yeah, I felt like doing the human starter area again and wanted to get away from the guild for a bit.
Friend: Ah, I guess you wouldn't be interested in coming to ICC then?
Me: Not really, sorry.

And they'd understand, because they are my friends.

Why is nobody running BC heroics anymore?

I've been working on the quest for epic flight form for my Alliance druid recently. I know I could just train it, but doing it the "proper" way just feels more rewarding to me, not to mention that it's simply an extremely cool and entertaining quest line. I now have Vanquish the Raven God in my quest log, and figured that with the dungeon finder it should be easy enough to get a group for it these days. Oh how wrong I was.

I don't know how much time I've spent sitting in the queue and waiting for a group for heroic Sethekk Halls in total by now, but it must add up to several hours. At no point did I ever see more than two other icons light up as the group was being assembled, even though I had signed up as able to fulfill all three roles to be as accomodating as possible. Often I'm utterly alone. It's discouraging.


I can understand that BC heroics are nowhere near as popular as the normal Northrend dungeons - there's no emblem reward and most drops are outclassed by Northrend greens. But still, I would have thought that there would still be some interest, be it for the achievements or simply a change of pace. I'm sure many altholics are tired of running normal Nexus for the umpteenth time, and I would have thought that simple curiosity would be enough to lure the occasional newbie into a BC heroic as well. After all I had little trouble getting into the old level seventy instances on normal mode, and that's with Blizzard removing the "random Outland dungeon" option from the dungeon finder at level sixty-nine or so, so you can only get into instances like Magister's Terrace if you sign up for them specifically. At least "random Outland heroic" remains an option for several levels. Why is that not enough?

My best guess at the moment is that the old attunements are simply too much of a stumbling block. I like attunements in general, but keeping them in place for instances that are nothing but levelling dungeons these days strikes me as a mistake on Blizzard's part. I know they are not at all difficult, and people might even reach the honoured requirement with various factions without as much as trying, but actually buying the keys requires knowledge that many curious newbies probably don't have, and effort that the jaded veterans might not want to bother with, as in: they might consider queuing up for an old heroic on a whim, but once they realise that they are locked out because they didn't think of buying all the keys while they were levelling through Outland, what are the chances that they'll actually stop their questing in Howling Fjord to march all the way back to Zangarmarsh or wherever just to buy those keys? Not very high, that's what.

The old Caverns of Time instances have the same problem, even on normal mode, seeing how you can't enter them without completing this quest first, which is a massive shame considering how much fun Escape from Durnholde and Opening of the Dark Portal are to play through. But again, a new player simply receives no pointers that this attunement is needed at all, and a veteran might simply not want to bother with flying down to Tanaris and then trudging in a circle for ten minutes just to unlock another instance that he'll soon outlevel anyway.

I did get lucky with Old Hillsbrad myself as I got a group almost instantly, but it was telling that one of the dps immediately exclaimed: "Finally, we've been in the queue for this one for three hours!" And the only reason that I got the Black Morass completed as well that day was that the group from Durnholde wanted to continue straight towards the followup really badly, probably knowing full well that they might not get another chance at finding a high enough number of attuned people anytime soon.

Really, it is just bizarre that it requires more effort to get into an Outland heroic than to get into a Northrend one, even though the former is levelling content that provides very little reward. I'm all for making people work to reach the top of the game, but if you want people to group while levelling as well, you really mustn't throw hurdles like that in their way (or even leave them as forgotten leftovers from a different time).

Damn you, Drakuru

This is a post that I've been meaning to make for a while, and Allison Robert's recent WoW.com article about some of the most fun achievements finally provided me with the much-needed incentive to write it. I always like Allison's articles, but in this case I must disagree with some of what she wrote, in particular with her choice for the 25th most fun achievement. Or rather, I'm not entirely sure whether I agree with the assertion that Guru of Drakuru is a very entertaining achievement to get - I'm not really into collecting achievements myself so I can't really say how it compares. However, I think that as a quest chain it's pretty poorly executed and more frustrating than fun. There are so many more entertaining quests in Wrath; this one just gets a lot of publicity because it has an achievement connected to it.

People praise it for telling a great story, and I certainly won't claim that the story is bad, but it's hardly all that original and inspiring either. We heroes of Azeroth already had quite a history of accidentally helping the bad guys before we ever went to Northrend. We don't always get to exact our revenge right away, but it's not entirely unheard of either.

However, as far as I'm aware we never had a quest chain before that allowed us to complete the ending before we'd even done the beginning, and that's shoddy storytelling if I ever saw it. Why not just do away with quest chains altogether? All quests should be available to everyone right away without anyone having to complete any prerequesites. Forget logic and consistency, long live freedom and accessability! Bah. I really don't think people who went to Zul'Drak before completing Grizzly Hills would have suffered massively if they had been temporarily blocked from this one quest chain for the sake of logic.

That aside, a good quest chain needs more than a nice story, it also needs to be fun to play through, ideally more than once, and I think this is an area where the Drakuru chain fails quite badly.

It's not so bad in Grizzly Hills; in fact the very first step of the way intrigued me a lot. Having to bloody myself with a knife to seal a truce? That's different. The rest of the chain was mostly old-fashioned item gathering however - something that I don't really mind - but considering how far WoW's quest tracking system has come over the years, it still fails quite impressively on this quest. You repeatedly have to gather troll mojo to be able to talk to Drakuru, but I suppose because the quest items get consumed before completion, they don't show up on the quest tracker. Meaning that you'll endlessly go back and forth between your inventory and everything else, trying to figure out if you've got enough troll mojo yet or need to slaughter another dozen trolls, which I found rather annoying.

The real kicker is the Zul'Drak half of the chain though. You have to infiltrate Drakuru's base using a scourge disguise which has a habit of failing every so often. Now, I'll admit that this was a neat idea in theory, especially inside the necropolis itself, where there are a couple of nasty elites and limited space, so the disguise failing really creates a certain sense of urgency whenever you squeeze yourself into the nearest corner to hide. Most of the sub-quests lead you out of the citadel itself however, and nothing out there is truly threatening, which makes the failure chance nothing but a nuisance to stall you as you wait for the "disguise failing soon" timer to run out so you can reapply it before moving on.

It's even worse if it happens during one of the tedious tasks that you have to complete for Drakuru to gain his trust. There's one step in particular which has you using a quest item to control geists and make them collect blight crystals. For some reason the geists move really slowly and you need to maintain control throughout the whole process for it to count - nothing like getting close to finishing a gather just as your disguise fails, and after you reapply it you have to start all over again.

The rest of the sub-quests are also mostly pet- or vehicle-related and while I don't remember my disguise ever failing while piloting a vehicle, I'm not entirely sure that it's actually impossible. Either way these quests featured more annoyance than fun for me as well. I particularly disliked the one where you have to AoE down some trolls using an exploding abomination. It wasn't entirely un-fun whenever it worked, but it wasn't unusual for me to be caught by respawning trolls in-between aboms, being forced to kill lots of them manually without getting any quest credit. Lame.

And then you finally get to the end of it all and get rewarded with one of Arthas's "joke" appearances, mocking you from on high but otherwise being amazingly unthreatening for the big bad of a whole expansion. Just fantastic.

I've been meaning to take my night elf priest through the Zul'Drak quests for a while now, but the mere thought of slogging through the painful latter half of this quest chain again has been putting me off so far. Blizzard has made a lot of great and fun quests in this expansion, but the Drakuru chain is not one of them in my opinion. They certainly tried, but in my eyes at least they missed the mark with this one.

Oho, Ahune!

I've expressed my distaste for the way holiday bosses used to work before: fighting the same dude (at least) five times in a row just to see the fight? No thanks.

No more of this silliness!

But lo and behold, along comes the dungeon finder for holiday bosses and I've been completely converted. You don't have to do the fight more than once anymore and it doesn't even hurt your chances at one of the rare drops since they go directly into a personalised satchel that's only available once per day anyway. Not to mention that it's extremely fast; even as dps I never had to wait more than five minutes so far. I don't know if that's simply because the fight is short or if there really are a lot more tanks queueing up - the ease and speed of the fight probably encourage a lot of people who usually feel intimidated by the notion of tanking a full heroic and the possible abuse they might expose themselves to in there.

The two frost emblems you get in your satchel are a nice bonus as well. A bit silly really for a whole five minutes of effort, but what the hell - the new expansion is drawing near and soon all our gear will be replaced anyway, why not let people gear up their alts while they still can.

Oh, and speaking of gearing up alts: so much love for the ilevel 232 cloaks for every class and spec. So far, good cloaks have been one of the things that are slightly harder to come by, at least if you're not swimming in frost emblems and thus own one of the frost emblem cloaks. Without raiding,, the best drops you could hope for until now were from the normal ICC five-mans and heroic Trial of the Champion, but they didn't cover everyone's stat needs optimally, and the best the vendors could offer you below frost level were these valor cloaks that haven't excited anyone for one and a half years. Across all my alts I've already acquired three new cloaks from Ahune (including for off-specs and the like) and I'm hoping for another three before the festival is over.

Oh, and until then, any non-useful cloaks that I might win on greed rolls can be vendored! Joy! It's been so long that I visited Ahune before this year that I can't actually remember for sure how his loot in specific was handled before, but I remember other holiday boss loot having no sell price so if nobody could use it, it would just rot there because there was nothing else you could do with it. Hopefully that won't be the case anymore for any of them, as I hate having to leave sparkles behind.

The one thing that threw me a little was how easy the fight seemed compared to what I remember. The last time I fought Ahune before this week was two years ago, when the level cap was at seventy, and I remember him being quite a tough bugger that took a long time to kill. On my recent attempts however I didn't have a single party that didn't down him the first time he withdrew into his frozen core or shortly afterwards. I remember in the past he would easily go through two or three phases at least, and didn't the elite adds spawn much more frequently as well? That said, I'm not complaining - he's clearly not meant to be much more than a holiday loot piñata, and I can live with him being just that.

All in all I really have to give Blizzard kudos for the changes they made to the system here. It's not entirely without downsides (I've seen comments from people who miss being able to boost their lower-level friends and alts for example), but as far as I'm concerned this is one change where the good definitely outweighs the bad, and by far.

Going from WoW to Dragon Age

I have a confession to make: I haven't been playing a lot of WoW in the past couple of days; instead I've been playing Dragon Age. This is unusal for me in so far as I never played a single-player roleplaying game before. Yep, you read that right. Before I got into WoW I used to play old school adventure games, real-time strategy games and The Sims, but never any RPGs. They looked very similar to action adventures to me, and I didn't like action adventures because they took the old school adventure games that I loved and slowly shifted their focus towards jumping, running and fighting, which was simply not something I wanted from the genre. The only reason I ended up getting Dragon Age was because Spinks raved about it when it first came out and I was intrigued by the things she posted.

After I finished playing with the extremely detailed character creator, I found that the game itself looked pleasantly familiar to a WoW player: I need to upgrade my gear, clicking on things that sparkle is useful, there's my health and my mana bar, warriors are the tough guys in plate, mages cast cone of cold and heal... wait, what? Healing mages? Well, since there are no priests or anything of the like, someone had to do it I guess.

The main difference between Dragon Age, or any single-player RPG I suppose, and a game like WoW is the shift of focus. A single-player game is all about the story: You need to go out and save the world, and everything you do is focused on making the next step necessary to achieve that goal. You gain levels on the way, upgrade your gear, learn some professions... but it all feels damn trivial in comparison. I mean, my main character is a herbalist and can make healing potions out of flowers she finds by the road, but considering the same potions drop off dead monsters like candy it feels pretty superfluous. Not to mention that there are no skill-ups for using your profession or anything like that.

Upgrading your gear is nice, but there don't seem to be all that many different options and it all kind of looks the same (boo realism). In WoW I get excited about gear upgrades; in Dragon Age the constant need to check whether what just dropped is better than what I already have before selling it all simply feels like a nuisance that stalls my story progression - though I guess the fact that I'm having to manage the outfits of a whole party at once isn't helping. (Are these boots an upgrade for my warrior? No? What about the other warrior?)

In contrast to that, a game like WoW has an overarching story too (like in the case of the current expansion the expedition to Northrend and battling the Lich King), but it's comparatively low-key. Most quests are only very tangentially related to the plot (at best), and a lot of things that are basically just "fluff" in single-player games are inflated to be full-blown, very time-consuming features that become a goal onto themselves, like gaining levels to be able to advance, skilling up professions or collecting all the best gear available.

Looking at it from that angle, I think I can understand why many people complain about a lot of aspects of WoW being too "grindy", if these people are used to the way these things work in single-player RPGs. Why do I have to waste so much time collecting all that gear if all I want to do is kill the Lich King?

Coming at it from the other end of the spectrum however, as someone who started with MMOs without ever having tried anything similar, it feels like the MMO way of requiring everything to take a lot of time is the normal way to go and anything else is lacking. After all, things like skilling up professions can be a mini-game of their own! It's all about perspective I guess.

Your friend, the healing UI

While there are a lot of guides out there on how to use various healing addons to your maximum advantage, I noticed that among many players who are new or not that dedicated to healing, there still seems to be a lot of prejudice against healing addons in general. People consider them "cheating", think that they are such good players that they don't need them, or might be interested in getting one but find them too confusing to use efficiently.

Is Healbot "cheating"?

I think part of this prejudice goes back to a long time ago, before I was raiding myself. I remember being told about Healbot, Decursive and other addons being so "smart" that you basically only had to push one button and they would always cast the right spell on the right target for you. But Blizzard banned that functionality for a reason, and nowadays Healbot for example certainly doesn't make any decisions for you; it just allows you to get a better overview of what's going on and to react to changes more quickly. Healbot changing the colour of the raid frame of a person that has been hit by a debuff is no different from Deadly Boss Mods telling you about the same thing (and few people would want to forsake DBM or similar addons), and I believe the "click to heal" thing can be achieved with mouseover macros as well, but I suck at macros so installing an addon that does the same thing is simply easier for me.

In other words, I know that different people have different ideas of what's "cheating" and what isn't, regardless of Blizzard's official policy, but unless you're completely against addons altogether, there's no reason to frown upon dedicated healing UIs. They just give you bigger or at least more distinguished icons and health bars and replace the functionality of mouseover macros.

But I'm a good healer anyway, I don't need any addons!

I admit it, I used to think like that. And then I watched a friend of mine play the game one day, using Healbot in a raid, and she obviously saved so much reaction time! I was so amazed by this that I installed the addon myself and guess what, I became an even better healer.

The thing is, WoW's default UI is really not that healer-friendly. It's got a bit better over the years but still... I never had trouble raiding as dps with the default UI, because I could set it to only show my own debuffs on the boss, and if I had to switch targets quickly I just hit tab or used a targetting macro (hello there, Kael'thas in the Eye). As a healer on the other hand, something as simple as Kel'Thuzad's frost blast completely screws you over if you don't have an addon. I mean, you can set the default UI to only show debuffs that you can dispel to reduce clutter, alright, but you can't dispel frost blast so if you use that setting you can't see it. D'oh! Tab through all the people in your raid until you find the right one? You've got to be kidding me. So you frantically look for the right person, finally find them, select them, cast your heal... and they are probably dead, because you only have three seconds to react and cast your heal before the damage kills them.

This isn't even a question of being good or bad at healing, as in knowing which spells to use or how to manage your mana. It's simple reaction time. It's human nature that you can only react to things so fast, and when the game makes healing a matter of seconds, then shaving off even a half-second can make the difference between failure and success. Being able to see the debuffed person highlighted right away and healing them with just a click instead of clicking and then pressing the heal does save time. Even if the addon only enables you to cast your heals a half-second faster, just think of how much difference that's going to make in today's world of non-stop healing in raids! You could be going from casting 120 heals in a four-minute fight to casting 160, increasing your output by a third!

You certainly don't need an addon to heal five-mans, and maybe if you never ever heal anything but the tank in a raid you can get away without one too, but if you are actually raid-healing ten to twenty-five people, constantly having to switch targets, this kind of thing is really a must. I'm pretty sure Blizzard is so used to everyone using these addons that they actually design the fights with these minimised reaction times in mind these days. Who knows, things might change in Cataclysm if healing becomes slower and a bit more relaxed - plus they said that they want to make changes to the UI too, so maybe there'll finally be a built-in "healer mode". Until then, addons it is.

Okay, you've convinced me... but this stuff looks so complicated, it's giving me a headache!

The main big addons that people like to use for healing are Grid, Vuhdo and Healbot. Zelmaru writes a lot of Grid guides and Tam has one for how to set up Vuhdo. From what I hear they are very good addons if you love customisation, but being more of a "give me something simple that works" person, just looking at those guides makes my eyes glaze over (no offense). If you have similar feelings I can heartily recommend Healbot as something that is easy to handle right out of the box. I don't think anyone even needs a guide on how to use it, really. Just install it, go to the "options" panel, under "spells" type out which abilities you want to be bound to which mouse clicks or mouse/keyboard combos, under "cure" set it to show debuffs affected by your class's dispels (so as a priest, you'd select "abolish disease" and "dispel magic") and wham, bam, thank you ma'am, you should be good to go. You can make other adjustments too of course, like changing the size of the displayed health bars, but that's not that key and either way easy to figure out with a bit of trial and error. So no, it being too complicated definitely isn't an excuse either. Come on, give it a try!

Bad pug of the month: Pit of Saron

Looking back at my own posts here it's actually been months since I last had an absolutely awful pug. With things quieting down a bit in the pre-expansion lull I was hoping that the atmosphere in your average run was indeed getting better. You know, people chilling out a bit and not fretting about how every second in which they don't gain badges is "wasted". It was just a pipe dream of course.

This morning my boyfriend woke me by proudly announcing that he had just won a battered hilt - lucky sod that he is - after we had both talked about wanting to get one for our alts the day before. Not wanting to be one-upped like that I grabbed one from the auction house as well and we set off to do the quest chain together. Eventually this involved jumping into heroic Pit of Saron. The characters we were doing this on were my bear druid and his warlock alt.

We got grouped with a mage, another warlock and a priest healer. The other warlock immediately asked if anyone else was going for the Nevermelting Ice Crystal from the last boss, and when my boyfriend answered truthfully that he was after it as well, the guy got annoyed and basically offered to bribe him if he wouldn't roll on it. Someone pointed out that you can't trade gold cross-server anyway, and he went back to just muttering angrily.

We killed a couple of extra trash mobs around Garfrost's platform to gather our quest items, but soon decided that it was probably more prudent to finish the instance first and then go back and look for more, so as to not keep the other players waiting. After the first boss, the other warlock started to question my boyfriend's damage output and demonology spec, going on about how destruction was the way to go for PvE. The priest actually disagreed with him, claiming that his own main was a warlock as well. For the record, my boyfriend was below the mage and the other lock on the meters, doing about 3k dps - probably less than he should be capable of, but the spec was new to him and it was hardly holding us back in any way. At a guess, the other lock was just angry that my boyfriend wanted the trinket as well and thus decided to be as pissy to the competition as possible.

As we progressed through the instance he became more and more obsessed with emphasising how much more "leet" he was, even standing completely still in Krick's explosive mines to squeeze out as much damage as possible and constantly berating my boyfriend's performance as if he wasn't even there. We continued while gnashing our teeth, but still wanted to finish the run.

On the way up the tunnel the rude lock unsurprisingly started to nuke the loose skeletons before we even made it to the middle, got aggro and died. The healer wanted to go back and res him, which led to a lot of milling back and forth until we decided that it was more sensible to finish clearing out the tunnel and worry about the dead lock later. As we did this, said lock - who, which bears repeating, had got himself killed stupidly on the first few mobs and was thus doing exactly zero dps - still kept going on about how my boyfriend's lock was supposedly doing terrible damage, and the healer was so busy discussing this fact with him that he didn't heal me and we wiped just as we made it to the top.

As I was starting to lose my patience by that point I told them to shut up and that nobody cared about the damage meters, at which point they decided to vote-kick my boyfriend... and it went through. Yes, after the other lock had got himself killed and the priest had been so busy discussing warlock specs with him that we wiped, my boyfriend got the boot. Where's the bloody logic in that and why did the mage support it? I left of course, because... DUH.

I have no illusions that they probably got replacements fairly soon and managed to finish. Maybe the warlock even got his trinket - I couldn't check on the armoury because I forgot his name. It's just sad because it really highlights the kind of crap people can get away with these days. Pre-dungeon finder a guy like that would have found himself blacklisted real quick, but nowadays it's all just part of a hard day's pugging. Pfft.